[metapost] Trying to use MT1 to make outline fonts... (again)

[Shriramana Sharma]

While I'm at it, I notice that Malyshev writes
(www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb16-1/tb46malyPT.pdf p 4):

<quote>
Later Daniel M. Berry and Shimon Yanai (1990)
have developed a more successful program, mf2ps,
that finds the internally generated METAFONT en-
velopes, used as the boundaries of the inked region,
and uses these envelopes as the PostScript outlines.

...

To produce outlines suitable for Type 1 fonts,
all envelope overlapping should be removed. The
result of this operation is shown in figure 6.</quote>

If it is thus possible to obtain the actual METAFONT envelopes, why
does MT1 (or any other program attempting to convert MF to outlines)
not just use these envelopes (and remove overlapping using FontForge
or such)?

He further writes:

<quote>Note
that the resulting outlines contain too many con-
secutive lines and curves split into many pieces. To
obtain outlines free from such defects, I have made
some geometrical optimization.
</quote>

Does anyone know whether he (or is he on this list?) published the
nature of these optimizations? Are there generic scripts that do this
or is it manual?

Sorry if I seem to be asking too many questions. MF/MT1 fascinates me,
and I am trying to do my homework reading before asking (as you can
see from all these quotes), but sometimes my enthu gets the better of
me! :-)

-- 
Shriramana Sharma